


SAME

by twowritehands



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, Flirting, Made Up Backstory for Edrisa, UST, what if Malcolm had mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-16 21:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21043286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twowritehands/pseuds/twowritehands
Summary: Murder nerds flirt over coffee.





	SAME

**Author's Note:**

> this is our 100th fic posted here! Can I Get a Wahoo? (i know that's a different fandom but it's how i feel lol)

Edrisa stepped into the break room to find none other than Malcolm Bright pouring himself a cup of coffee. No one else was around. Her heart quickened and stole her breath away. This was her chance, finally, to talk to him without the judging eyes of the rest of the team.

_ Be cool, Eddie. Be cool. _

“Heeeey,” she said, adopting some kind of swagger in her step as she parked next to him at the counter. She sort of watched herself from the outside; the standard out-of-body experience that came with interacting with every bone-deep Crush she had ever had. By this point, she would have been worried had she remained in her own skin.

Malcolm glanced and then smiled in what seemed to be genuine pleasure at her company. Now her stomach was fluttering. He was _ so handsome. _ More handsome than a son of a bitch had any right to be, actually. Those eyes? Un. Fair.

“Coffee?” he asked. Oh god, and his voice was good, too.

“Yes, please.”

He handed her the coffee pot, and their fingers brushed. Thankfully, she did not drop the mug because of it. _ Oh god _ . His fingertips were so _ smooth _. Did he moisturize?

“How are you today, Ms. Tanaka?”

“Oh, you can call me Eddie,” she said.

To this, his lips parted and the smile became more playful. “Then I shall do so.”

She was waiting on the creamer. He handed it off, then the sugar. She used the same amounts he had, doing the happy dance in her head. They had coffee taste in common!

Malcolm grabbed two stirrers and dropped one into her cup for her. She grinned. “Thank you.”

He took a seat at the table and crossed his legs. Since he had no files with him, Edrisa took the seat opposite him. It felt so good to be off her feet that an honest to god moan escaped her. “I did not get enough sleep last night. I woke up tired. It must have been some kind of stressful dream, but I don’t remember any of it.”

He quirked an eyebrow. She gulped, ears warming up. “Oh. I hope you don’t mind conversation. I spend all day with dead people. I kind of ramble when I’m with the living. Sorry.”

One side of his mouth hiked higher. “I know a lot about bad nights.”

“Of course you do. I heard about the, uh. The night terrors. Sorry to mention it.”

He snorted lightly. “No worries. I’m the one who brought it up.”

“I mentioned bad dreams.”

“Which are not the same as night terrors. You’re okay. Besides, I like to hear about dreams. It’s a fascinating study of human consciousness. I’ve kept a dream journal since I was a kid.”

“Me too!”

“Not counting the night terrors, I find I cycle through a number of recurring dreams.”

“Me too!” She was still outside her body and she was cringing, screaming at herself _ say more than those two words _!

A smirk was squirming on his face. “Most of the time, it is falling.”

“Same,” she intoned. _ C’mon Eddie. You can do better than that. _

Malcolm gave her the side eye again. Edrisa pushed air through her nose. “Okay, I swear, I’m not just agreeing with everything you say. I really do dream of falling down elevator shafts.”

“Okay,” he said primly. He clearly did not believe her.

“I’m serious!”

“I believe you.” He didn’t.

“Here. I am going to write down my other recurring dreams before you say yours.” She grabbed a pen from her breast pocket and scrawled answers on a napkin. “Okay. Go.”

He chuckled and neatly folded his hands together. She waited with baited breath. This was actually really exciting. What was he going to say?

“My other dreams are being back in high school, and driving a runaway vehicle.”

Edrisa gasped softly and uncovered the napkin. Her bold letters said

LATE FOR CLASS and CAR WITH NO BRAKES

Malcolm’s lips smacked as they parted. (His lips were _ so pink. _) He lifted those bright eyes to her, and their child-like glee thrummed between them. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

“That we both suffer from anxiety and feel out of control most of the time,” she said, quoting the popular interpretations.

“Well--yes, but I meant do you know what we have to do?”

She clucked her tongue. “Keep asking questions and writing all our answers down to see how much we have in common.”

Malcolm fished a pen from his inner pocket and grabbed a napkin of his own. “Okay. Since we both have anxiety: What homeopathic methods do you use to manage it?”

“Hm. So meds don’t count...” This was tricky, since she did rely on pharmaceuticals. She tapped her pen a few times before writing, _ morning jogs _ and _ end of day meditation _.

He shielded his napkin as he wrote and then clicked his pen. “And show your answer,” he said with the flare of a gameshow host. They turned their napkins over.

His said _ daily exercise and yoga _.

“Boom!” she cried happily before checking herself. “But those are highly recommended techniques.”

He visibly checked himself too. “True. But you could have said sleep.”

“Sleep?” she flapped her lips. “Please. I’m an insomniac.”

Malcolm bit his lower lip like he was trying not to grin. She went breathless. Holy shit, was he into her??? Her throat went dry. He sparkled at her. “You ask the next one.”

“Ooh, um.” Crap, her mind was reeling. “Let’s skip the basic ones like favorite color--”

“--yes, I agree. I like deep questions.” he practically took the words off her lips, so she agreed,

“_ Way _ more fun. So. Let’s see… deep question…” horrifically, her mind was grinding to a halt. What counted as a deep question? _ Have you ever been in love? Do you want a spring wedding? _She wanted these answers but no way in hell would she ask them.

Malcolm started humming the clock song on Jeopardy.

She laughed and kicked his foot to make him cut it out. She could ask why he was a profiler, but that was obvious. A light bulb came on. “Okay. In a world without crime, what would you do?”

He literally balked. “Wow. I like this one. It's a _ really _ good question...”

Edrisa preened and mentally high fived herself. He literally scratched his chin, and his eyes became _ so _ pensive. She could have spent the entire rest of the coffee break just watching him think.

“Let me sit with that for a bit,” he said. “I will get back to you.”

She gulped. He could have said any random, ridiculous thing, but instead he was taking it seriously. She sipped the coffee to wet her throat. “Okay.”

“Do you have an answer?”

The spotlight on her soul made her feel suddenly naked. She covered the napkin where she had written half her answer already. “Yes, of course, but I don't want to influence yours so…” she scribbled it out.

He gave her a special grin. “Let's put a pin in that. For next time.”

Her heart swelled to think that they would have such a pleasant game again. “Save it for later. Yeah. Okay, your turn.”

“Okay. What is your favorite part of Anatomy?”

“Oh. Nice one.” she started writing. “I have an answer immediately. Do you have an answer?”

“Yes.” His pen scratched at the napkin for so long, she anticipated a long line of formal latin terminology. Part of her expected a man-answer like breasts or vagina, but he had shown such sincere Reflection before she couldn’t help but hope his would be something thought provoking. “I'm dying to know yours.”

He had a cat grin. “You first.”

She showed her napkin. _ The eyeball. _

“HA!” he revealed a rough sketch of an eyeball with an optical nerve attached. She whooped. “THE EYEBALL! 

They high fived and Edrisa launched into her reasons for favoring the human eye. Malcolm nodded along, animated, and in the back of her head she thought she had to be dreaming. No way this coffee break chat was going so well. No way was she actually clicking with a crush. Usually she came on too strong and scared them off with her endless talk of death.

By the time they reached the bottom of their paper cups, their napkins were covered in ink, and they were reciting the Harvard alma mater.

***

Malcolm hadn’t laughed this much in far too long. Certainly not since losing his job and returning to a city that was haunted by the past. And this game they were playing? Silly but _ so fun _ . It took 5 questions before they came to one where they finally had different answers. She liked turtles, and while she had nothing against birds, she wouldn’t call herself a bird lover. A few questions later and they had differing favorite genres of fiction to read. But freakishly often their answers lined up. But somehow-- _ somehow _\--their answers matched more often than not.

Maybe the weirdest part was how even when they didn’t have the same answer, they were laughing and having a good time.

As they refilled their coffee cups, Edrisa posed the question: how old were you when you lost your V card? She turned a lovely shade of vermillion the moment the question was out but Malcolm didn’t mind answering. Or hearing her answer.

Scribbling two digits on his napkin, Malcolm covered it with his palm and watched Edrisa write what had to be a full sentence.

“Ready?” He asked. 

She nodded. “You first.”

He lifted his palm. “19.” He shrugged over the mild twang of embarrassment. “Kind of a late bloomer, I guess?”

Edrisa snorted--extremely unlady like but adorable-- and flicked her napkin around so he could read it.

_ Four days after my twenty fifth birthday _, it read. Malcolm’s eyebrows went way up and he was smiling as he cut his eyes to her. She shrugged. “It was by design. I told myself I wasn’t going to be like my mom and so I put teenage boys on the back burner. Focused on more important things.”

“Not like your mother?” Malcolm repeated with a frown. “How do you mean? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“Oh, no I don’t mind.” She adjusted her glasses and cleared her throat before saying, “My mother is a pedophile.”

Malcolm spit up his sip of coffee.

Edrisa chortled. “Sorry.”

“No, no. It’s… it’s fine. Just not what one expects to hear. About a mother.”

“Yeah. That’s ma,” she said dryly. “She had a bad habit of going to bed with boys from her high school health class. The joke is she took sex education _ way _ to far. She went to prison when I was thirteen. I made a vow to be the opposite of her and that meant having nothing to do with teenage boys. And so I didn’t. Dating older boys gave me the heebie-jeebies and so I just waited until my peers were of completely legal consenting age, and by then med school was more important than dating. So. Yeah. 25.”

Malcolm was charmed. He studied Edrisa carefully. “No wonder you haven’t batted an eyelash about my family drama.”

She shrugged. “As far as parents who ruin everything, you got the more interesting end of the stick. People _ want _to talk about serial killers. Pedophiles? Not so much. I told all my college friends she was in prison for tax evasion. I knew no one would be interested enough in taxes to google around for details.”

Malcolm leaned on his elbows. “Do you visit her? Phone calls?”

“Small doses I guess? I mean, she’s my mom. She loves me, and I can’t help but love her, or whatever. But it’s also Her Show _ all the time _ . You know?” She sat back in her chair and rolled her eyes. Picked up her cup and looked down into it. “She’s up for parole in about 2 years. _ That’ll _be interesting.”

Sensing she was going into a sour head space, Malcolm tapped his pen on the table. “Ok, so we both had parents go to prison when were were adolescents. I’m marking that as a match.” On a third napkin, he put a tally mark under the Match side. That side was far more crowded than the Strike side.

“What’s the score?” Edrisa asked.

“That makes it 15 to 8.”

“How crazy is that?” Edrisa shook her head, kind of sinking behind her coffee cup. “I’d almost call it eerie.”

“Ok,” Malcolm finally remembered that clocks and time and Work was a thing. They needed to wrap this up. “Before we go back to work, let’s answer that one question.”

“In a world without crime, what would you do for a living?” Edrisa perked up and immediately started writing on her napkin.

“If we match on this I’ll take you to dinner,” Malcolm said. She jumped as if she touched a live battery.

“Dinner?” she squeaked.

Malcolm let a slow smile stretched his lips. “Yeah. Dinner.”

“And,” she was extremely nervous now. Forgetting to look right at him, or just incapable. Shifting in her seat. “And… if… it’s a strike?” she fiddled nervously with her pen.

“It’ll have to be brunch,” he said with a playful wince.

“Deal,” she said.

They wrote down their answers.

“You first,” she said.

“In a world without crime, my dad never would have gone Dark Side so I would have continued learning medicine at his knee. Which I loved. He made it so interesting. So fascinating. I wanted nothing more than to be a doctor just like him. So if he never ruined that? Then, yeah, I’d have been a general practice physician.”

Edrisa blinked. Blushed. And then pushed the napkin across the table.

He read it. “In a world without crime, the worst thing that could happen to people would be disease or accident. Both problems would be solved by a doctor. So I’d still be a doctor. Only maybe for the living.”

Malcolm laughed. “Shit!”

“You don’t have to take me to dinner,” she rushed. “It was just a silly game--”

“No. I said I would because I want to.”

“Really?” she squealed and then cleared her throat and much more casually she said. “I mean. Yeah. Cool. Just let me know when and where and stuff…”

Malcolm stood. She stood. He stepped toward her and--sensing he was welcome--pressed a kiss to her cheek. She smelled fantastic. Even after working in a morgue all morning. How? “You’re amazing.”

She was stone still. Practically shaking like a leaf. It wasn’t until Malcolm returned her personal space that she exhaled and then kind of swayed into him. She was _ beaming _ at him. “ _ You’re _ amazing,” she echoed.

“BRIGHT!” Gil hollered across the precinct. “This isn’t the FBI where you can just jack off half the day. We need that profile TODAY!”

Malcolm made a funny face at Edrisa. “Back to work.”

She giggled. He winked and walked away from her. When the break room door closed behind him, he heard the muffled sounds of squealing, and as he passed the break room windows, he saw through the blinds that she was doing a victory dance.

When she saw him, she stopped and then sank behind the chair.

Malcolm went back to work still smiling.


End file.
